A Soul Would Understand My Soul
by Sythar
Summary: Oneshot Grantaire muses on life, theatre, wine, and ... naturally, Enjolras. Whimsical, with quotations from Lamartine. Rating for safety considering there is a touch of swearing in French.


As curious as a cat and twice as sly, Scaramouche paced across the stage and delivered a whisper loud enough to be heard at the end of the hall. "Lovers! Ah me! But how will all these things end, my sweets? My loves, my darlings? Lovers are never meant to be longer than the tip-end of your mother's finger! They are clouds of air and will be buffeted to rain by yon thundering Zues as is my master!" One slightly crooked finger touched the long glorious nose of the mask and wide lips curved up wider into the signature grin of the wily dreaming trickster, the pan and the Loki that was Scaramouche.

The audience roared. It roared for his wiles and for his falls, when he was buffeted by Pantaloon and Punchinello, and when he whisked young Columbine out of the grasp of her father. The audience loved Scaramouche in all his masks. Whether a clown or a swindler.

The play finished as it always would, Harlequin and Columbine in each others' arms, Pierot heartbroken and alone, Pantaloon raging, and Scaramouche master of the dance. He jigged with Columbine, blew kisses to the ladies, and slipped off the stage to the dusty crowded rooms behind. Everything smelled of paint and grease, sweat and dust and the musty old clothes. Perceval Grantaire removed the mask and threw it over a beam, ruffling Pierot's curls and blowing a kiss to young Columbine.

"Nicely done, Scaramouche," Punchinello rumbled, undoing the large padded stomach that fitted him out for his occasional forays into the part of Pantaloon. "Do try to keep the classical quotations out of things, if you will. It is fine and magnificent in the great tragedies, but in Italian Comedy... well. What would Scaramouche know of Zeus?"

"Is not Zues a cousin of Jupiter?" Grantaire drawled, wiping the powder from his face with a cloth that smelled of the four dozen other men who had used it. "Is not Jupiter Roman? Is not Rome in Italy?"

"Are not we in France playing roles from stitched imaginations and history?" Punchinello replied, his dark eyes twinkling slightly over the flowing white beard Columbine had seen fit to stick on his face. "Are not you yourself a Frenchman and not Scaramouche at all?"

"Nonsense. I have always been Scaramouche."

Pedrolino strolled by with the takings and slipped Grantaire a five franc piece. "If you'd always been Scaramouche, you'd call yourself a doctor and have airs and graces," he drawled in a thick country accent which made him impossible for any speaking role which was not fraught with comic relief. Funny man, Grantaire thought. A man with more nose than he had brain.

Five francs was a measly wage for a weeks playing, but he knew it was fair. One thing Punchinello had never done yet was to cheat him. Now there's a mercy. Fairness and truth in the bowels of a theatre. The just and righteous would be scandalised. He took the coin and gathered his things, making a sweeping bow to the room. "Alas, but I must leave you. Take care of yourself, Columbine. Pierot - let Harlequin be. Punchinello... you are not a man who should wear whiskers."

They laughed, as all men should at Scaramouche, and bade him goodbye. Another play over, five francs the richer, and feeling somewhat naked without his mask, Grantaire walked - still in the footsteps of a cat - towards the Cafe Musain. For company, he argued. Company which was cheerful and politically unwise. Company and wine and the thunderbolts of a god. Not sentiment. Dieu. Dieu and Zues and small pottery gods, no.

Scaramouche was not a sentimental creature.

In the Cafe he found only one student, with the air of a student, bent over the books of a student. Having once been - oh so many _many_ years ago - a student himself, Grantaire smiled a small, cynical smile and ordered wine. He was in the mood for wine. Theatre put him off absinthe as a rule. Never mix fairies and theatricals. That putain English writer had tries it and look where it had gotten him.

Donkeys.

_Really_.

He sat and toasted the bright golden head, his smile in place and his eyes seeing angels and sungods and bright terrible statues. Enjolras was writing his speeches no doubt, and would not be grateful for interruption. Of course, that had never prevented him before. "What point of Law catches your divine interest, Apollo?" he asked, no longer speaking the voice of Scaramouche but a common drunkard in the presence of a god.

"...shut up, Winecask." The head didn't even lift, the hand didn't pause on its way across the page. "Drink your dregs in silence and let me be."

"Je voudrais maintenant vider jusqu'a la lie," he said, draining the glass ironically. "Ce calice mele de nectar et de fiel." It always hurt to talk with Apollo. The sun should never beam all its scorn on one man alone, for fear of blistering him to ash. And yet at the same time, and Grantaire refilled his glass in the hopes that Apollo - not having been watching - would not realise he was onto his second round, at the same time it hurt not to talk to him too.

He was rather like beautiful terrible psalms played upon a lyre. Heartbreaking and cruel and terrible, but such a wonder that you knew you would regret it your whole life if you let the oportunity pass by.

"He was a Royalist," Enjolras said coldly. "Do not repeat his words around me, if you please."

"He was a poet," Grantaire replied. "His art should not be mingled with his politics, Apollo. That would be to discard too much beauty."

"And what do you know of beauty, Winecask?" It was hardly a question.

"Personally, very little. I am an observer of beauty," he drank again, and again refilled his glass, feeling the warmth of the alcohol give him the nerve he never had sober. "I never have and never will be a thing of beauty. But I do not complain. After all, Statue, beautiful things are looked at, while observers like myself can gaze our fill on them and be satisfied with that."

Finally, the eyes lifted from the page, and a glare like lightning in a blue summer sky pierced through the heart of a drunkard. Grantaire felt fear, awe, and worship in the mix that surely must have overcome the knights of old when looking at their Holy Grail. "Freedom is beautiful. Honour is beautiful. I cannot bring myself to suppose you have observed anything of either." A pause, and the younger man rose, collecting his books together and extinguishing the light on the table. "Though I will readily agree that you never will be anything beautiful at all, Winecask."

The Sun left then, and the room dwindled to dusk around the shoulders of Scaramouche... a drunkard and a thing of no beauty at all. He sighed and refilled his glass, looking over the wide, red brim at the seat occupied by a god. "Peut-etre dans la foule, une ame que j'ignore... aurait compris mon ame..."

And yet... no. No soul was like Scaramouche. He was a clown and a drunkard. A thing of fantasy. Grantaire toasted himself and his mask with a laugh, and left five francs for the pretty little waitress. What, after all, did a drunkard need with wealth?

He could observe it as easily as he could observe beauty.


End file.
